This week was an odd one. It featured Theatre Thursday on Wednesday, Philosophy Phriday on Thursday, and an […]

On Monday, a neat new study was published in Myrmecological News. This study, by Dr. Eduardo Gonçalves Paterson Fox and […]

Polydomy. It’s a thing. It’s a thing where a single ant colony occupies completely separate nesting chambers rather than a single nest site. Polydomy, in creating a more distributed nest structure, has been theorized to increase foraging efficiency and enhance acquisition of a more diverse set of resources. Yet, despite the prevalence of hypotheses and theoretical work relating to polydomy, little work to date has experimentally tested the impact of polydomy on foraging efficiency.

Fungus-farming ants (the “attines”) are one of the most widely recognized groups of ants, particularly in the form of leaf-cutter ants. They even feature prominently at the beginning of the best classic Disney movie, Ant Lion King:

Have you ever been stung by a fire ant? Even if you haven’t, you probably know how (supposedly) bad and evil fire ants are. Yet fire ants, and a couple other well-known invasive ant species like Argentine ants, are only a few out of about 13,000 known species of ants, and they give all of these other species a bad rap. So today, let’s look at a new study by co-first authors Kevin Li and Yifan He and colleagues that properly flips the script: invasive plants push around friendly native ants.

As regular readers of The Daily Ant know already, ants harbor lots of bacteria. A growing number of studies are revealing that we should investigate these microbial communities, and their associations with their hosts, in order to fully understand the ecology and evolution of ants. In pursuit of this goal, Manuela Ramalho and colleagues just published an interesting study on the microbial composition of one of the coolest ant groups – Polyrhachis, the spiny ants.

A Polyrhachis ant, with its microbial community. Photo: Melvyn Yeo

So, you have some communities of ants. You notice that some communities are more diverse than others. In […]

Anyone who is a human living in a human society knows that social life carries with it the risk […]

In our recent Philosophy Phriday interview with UNC philosopher Ram Neta, Dr. Neta expressed surprise at the fact […]

Meet Sophie Schofield, Dr. Tom Bishop, and Dr. Kate Parr:

These three ant researchers wanted to know how drastically different environments impact functional traits in ants. So, they found out, and published their discoveries in Myrmecological News in September of last year.